Addicted to producing web content since early 2001, I've blogged across several platforms and have written professionally for varied publications, including True/Slant, where I had a regular music column. Whether my blogs or columns were mostly about politics, current events or pop culture, the constant thread that ran through them was music. Even when writing about controversial or divisive topics, a simple piece where music is the focus always produced a commonality that could bring people together.
My first memory is of dancing to the Moody Blues' "Go Now" when I was three years old. Since then, almost every memory I have is tied to a song. I hope to bring that personal relationship with music to these pages, to take you along on my journey where I sift through genres and styles, through albums and song and introduce you to new sounds and find ways to make you rethink what you've already heard.

Ode to Vinyl Records

It seems every week there’s yet another article written about the resurgence of vinyl records. This has been going on for about five years and each subsequent article gives boost to the idea that not only do old school vinyl enthusiasts still want to “spin the black circle,” but there’s a crop of younger, excited music lovers who are buying records.

Every time I read one of these articles and start to get hyped up about generations after mine embracing vinyl, I have to explain to someone (for instance my 20 and 23 year old children) why I have such a vested interest in this, why I am emotionally attached to not just records themselves, but the intangible things that come with them.

My first “record” wasn’t vinyl at all, but an Archies record that I punched out of the back of a cereal box. No one would let me play it on their stereo. Not my parents, not my cousins, not even the next door neighbor. No one would dare let their precious needle touch a piece of cardboard pretending to be a record. I suspect now that it wasn’t so much the cardboard as it was the Archies themselves. I ended up listening to it on a Fisher-Price record player.

I was given real records after that – Partridge Family and Bobby Sherman collections and a few children’s albums, but they were just novelties. My real love affair with vinyl began when I was nine, when an older cousin introduced me to The Who’s Tommy. I remember pulling the record out of its sleeve as my cousin showed me how to properly handle a album. He placed my hands around the edge of the record, explaining about fingerprints and dust and grooves. He showed me how to drop the record on the turntable. Until then, I had been using the Fisher Price system and was a bit haphazard about how I handled my cardboard records. My cousin was almost reverent about it, holding the edges with his palm, placing the album gently on the turntable, dropping the needle on the groove by hand because he didn’t trust the automatic arm to do it right.

He turned the volume up. The unmistakable crackle and hiss of needle upon vinyl filled the room.

My love for vinyl was born at that moment.

I’ve been through all the phases of music storage since – 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, digital – and none of those storage mediums have the character of vinyl.

I’m not an audiophile by any means. When I say vinyl is the best form of music, it has nothing to do with how clean or pure the sound is; it’s about my sensory relationship with albums. The way a record feels in my hands, the symmetry and pattern of the grooves, even the imperfections – the scratches and skips – are part of what makes vinyl matter so much to me and what makes each individual album unique to its owner.

It’s the way my copy of Led Zeppelin IV had a little pop at the start and that pop became the intro to the song, the thing I always wait to hear right before Robert Plant’s Hey, hey mama.

It’s the way it feels to lift the arm and put the needle down on the record.

It’s in the watching of the vinyl spin around, each revolution a precise, timed piece of machinery pouring out sound.

It’s the way my mother’s copy of Sgt. Pepper had a scratch in it and to this day I can’t hear A Day in the Life without singing found my way up…found my way up…found my way upstairs, which was not a flaw so much as part of the charm of the record.

It’s going to a used record store and flipping through the rows and rows of albums in their plastic sleeves, pulling the vinyl out to study its condition, knowing that every worn groove tells a story. Vinyl is handled like no other medium, flipped and turned and gazed upon as one attempts to place the needle at the exact spot to start the song you want to hear. There’s no fast forward, no skip. It’s all manual, each record leaving the presence of its previous owner on its surface, leaving the album awash in personal history.

It’s in the cover art, large enough to frame and in the liner notes, read like fact sheets full of mystery and the familiar, read over and over again until memorized.

Can CDs or digital music offer you the artistry of records? Album covers framed and hung on the wall like pictures at an exhibition. Colored vinyl and picture discs turning your music into a work of art. In 1980, I bought True Colors by Split Enz and was endlessly entranced by the laser etching in the vinyl that made it seem full of colorful prisms. Later, I would work in a record store and spend my entire paycheck each week on seven inch imports, a reminder of my days of collecting 45s. Each record I owned had its own character, a specific memory attached to it – memories that were made of more than just sound. There’s the feel of the record, the sight of it, things so ingrained in the experience of listening to vinyl that just walking into a record store is like opening up a time machine.

I’ve never met a digital purchase that made me fall in love with it like a record. I’ll still love the music, but the mp3 is just a container for that music, where a record is part of the entire music experience.

It’s good to see that records are making a comeback. More and more bands are including album versions in their new releases. Turntables are selling again. A new generation is learning to embrace vinyl.

I hope they appreciate the imperfections that make records so, well, perfect.

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I love vinyl as well, though it does require more work. I tend to buy vinyl from the bands I love the most. CD’s are more practical for the rest. It will help if we start to see more new turntables, cartridges and high quality record cleaning products (Discwasher got bought out and gutted some time back).

Michelle, as the owner of Forever Vinyl, the rare and out of print music store at http://www.forevervinyl.com, we’ve never had a slow year selling records (which we specialize in). We carry 78′s, 33′s, 45′s, and have been featured on many well known website including Rolling Stone, Oprah.com and CNN in the past. Oprah drove over 80,000 customers to our site in one day only. There are a lot of vinyl record collectors out there! We just had one person call a few minutes ago looking for a record from about 1961. They offered us $200.00 to find it for us and we also just sold on consignment a Rolling Stones picture sleeve for $10,000. Vinyl records are far from dead. Regards. Scott Neuman President Forever Vinyl

Thank you for this great article! I love vinyl records as well and while reading the article, I felt, that every word is so true… Vinyl is so much more than simply music. For me my vinyl collection is somehow like a diary, it´s momories and arts.

Michele, I did like your article but in 40 years I have not found it hard to keep a record blemish-free. My copy of Lindsay Buckingham’s ‘Law & Order’ sounds exactly like it did when I bought it 32 years ago.

My pet peeve is when NEW vinyl comes out and it’s cut from a compressed and distorted digital file (or dubbed from a cd, like a couple of the lazier reissue labels are prone to do.

Records dubbed from a master tape and not a digital intermediate has roughly six times the resolution of a corresponding cd of the same title.